Treating sexuality as ethnicity requires a certain amount of essentialism. By this I mean that sexuality must come to seem as much a matter of "primordial affinities and attachments" as ethnicity does to most Americans... {Stability of behavior} should then be described as resting upon or resulting from a sexual identity, a persistent attribute beyond "behavior." This interpretation of sexuality in fact coincides with prevailing United States characterizations, in which people "really are" heterosexual or homosexual. (Phelan 1994:61).